lastile, external tiling with -buffer flag

[Leonardo Mauri]

Hello,

I am trying to tile some ALS LAZ files into smaller tiles of 1 km x 1 km.

In doing so I want to use a custom Shapefile with a user-defined grid, and I want to add an extra buffer to avoid edge-artifacts.

However, when running lastile with -external_tiling and -buffer flag, the latter seems not to have any effect on the generated tiles.

When inspecting the tile laz files with lasinfo, there is no indication of an extra VLR containing the buffer information.

My question: 

Is there a way to tile large point cloud with an external SHP and apply a buffer at the same time? 

As possible workaround I tested the following:

- tile with external SHP

- run las2las with -buffered option on the generated tiles.

Obviously, I would like to avoid the extra step to add buffer points if possible.

Is there any other, more efficient, way to achieve this?

Cheers,

Leonardo 

[James Carracher]

Hi Leonardo,

I'm just thinking aloud, I haven't actually tried this, its just a though of something else which may work. Perhaps you could buffer your shape file (In ArcGIS, QGIS, FME, whatever you use to make it) by the amount you want. Don't dissolve the overlap areas and then use lasclip to chop the laz files. Though with this you won't be able to remove the buffer as easily as with a second lastile instance if that is important to you

James